He came and wrapped her in his arms, her bare back to his bare torso.

“It’s time, I guess,” she said.

“I guess so, too.” He sighed. “Not that you couldn’t count my unused camp-time by years, but Mari gave me leave to solve the mystery of that thing, not to linger here in this brick-and-clapboard paradise. The hirelings have been giving me squinty looks for days.”

“They’ve been real nice to me,” she observed accurately.

“You’re good at finding friends.” In fact, everyone from the cooks, scullions, chambermaids, and horse boys up to the owner and his wife had grown downright defensive of Fawn, farmer heroine as she was. To the point where Dag suspected that if she demanded, Throw this lanky fellow into the street! he’d shortly find himself sitting in the dust clutching his saddlebags. The Glassforgers who worked here were used to patrollers and their odd ways with each other, but it was clear enough to Dag that they just barely tolerated this mismatch, and that only for the sake of Fawn’s obvious delight. Other patrons now drifting in, drovers and drivers and traveling families and boatmen up from the river to secure cargoes, looked askance at the odd pair, and even more askance after collecting whatever garbled gossip was circulating about them.

Dag wondered how askance he would be looked at in West Blue. Fawn had gradually grown reconciled to the planned stop at her home, partly from guilt at his word picture of her parents’ probable anxiety, and partly by his pledge not to abandon her there. It was the only promise she’d ever asked him to repeat.

He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, letting his finger snake around and drift over the healing wounds on her left cheek. “Your bruises are fading now. I figure if I bring you back to your family claiming to be your protector, it’ll be more convincing if you don’t look like you just lost a drunken brawl.”

Her lips twitched up as she caught his hand and kissed it, but then her fingers drifted to the malice marks on her neck. “Except for these.”

“Don’t pick.”

“They itch. Are they ever going to drop off? The other scabs did already.”

“Soon enough, I judge. It’ll leave these deep bitter-red dents underneath for a time, but they’ll fade almost like other scars. They’ll turn silvery when they’re old.”

“Oh—that long shiny groove on your leg that starts behind your knee and goes around up your thigh—was that a malice-clawing, then?” She had mapped every mark upon him as assiduously as a pattern-grid surveyor, these past days and nights, and demanded annotations for most of them, too.

“Just a touch. I got away, and my linker put his knife in a moment later.”